Having the feature of storing arbitrary data into an storage cell, we could save dynamic length values in a different way. Actually, saving an string into contract storage in the Etherem Virtual Machine is very convoluted: the string is saved in may cells, with addresses calculated via a hash (see… ).
Now, in RSK contract storage, the string could be saved in a single cell:
A single string should be saved in a single cell of variable length. This feature is not implemented, yet. This post is a proposal. I think it is possible to implement this new feature without changing the normal storage. Two things are needed: some new opcodes and a solidity (or other contract programming language) compiler that uses those new opcodes.
Even the arrays could be saved in a SINGLE cell. The cell address points to a value that describes the array (the length in the below image) and additional storage trie keys had the array values:
The internal storage trie is not limited to 32-bytes keys. It could have keys of arbitrary length. In the above figure, the index of the array elements are appended to the array address.
Even a map of addresses to balances could be storage in that way:
To discuss in next posts: the new opcodes to implement, storage costs, new compiler output.
Stay tuned!
Angel “Java” Lopez
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